Description

The ‘base’ ServerTemplate for Linux contains the minimum set of scripts and alerts for optimized server management through the RightScale platform such as:

Scripts for setting up monitoring and generation of real-time graphs in the Dashboard

Creation of alert specifications for automation.

Best practices alerts that are pre-configured under the Alerts tab.

It’s strongly recommended that you begin custom ServerTemplate development by cloning the ‘base’ ServerTemplate and then modify it to meet your needs.

Overview

Minimum Scripts for Best Practices

Since the “Base” ServerTemplate contains the minimum set of script that are required for optimal server management within the RightScale management platform, it’s recommended that these scripts are not deleted from a ServerTemplate unless you are an advanced user and are aware of the ramifications.

The minimum set of scripts in the "Base" ServerTemplate are found in most ServerTemplates published by RightScale and perform the following setup operations:

ephemeral_lvm::default - This recipe sets up available ephemeral devices to be an LVM device, formats it, and mounts it.

rs-base::swap* - Creates a swapfile of the specified size (in GB) node['rs-base']['swap']['size'] in the specified location node['rs-base']['swap']['file'] and enables its usage. The swap file is added to /etc/fstab and will persist across reboots. If the size or the file location is invalid this recipe will fail with an error message indicating what the failure was.

* To shorten the list of run scripts for other ServerTemplates, rs-base::default contains the last 5 scripts and can be used in place of them.

Important! As a general best practice, any new scripts that you add to the ServerTemplate should be added to the bottom of the existing boot script list.

Logging

By default, the rs-base::rsyslog script configures a server to store log data locally. But when you terminate the instance, all of its logs will be lost. So, if it's necessary to preserve log data after an instance is terminated, you can easily configure the server to send its logs to a central logging server or service by setting the Remote rsyslog Server input to either a FQDN or IP address of the remote logging server.